Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  Sudden noises.

  Tobacco smoke.

  A long-dead business owner curious about the new man in his shop?

  All that and more became part of a peculiar fifteen years for S. C. Dixon, a time spent, he believes, fending off an aggresive spirit that never quite accepted the studio’s third and, as it turned out, final proprietor.

  Built in 1929 during the golden age of movie palaces and recently remodeled to near original, pristine condition, the Fox Granada Theater is resplendent in the plush, Spanish Renaissance design so popular in 1920s movie theaters. During the heyday of its operation, silent, then talking, motion pictures and sometimes live vaudeville entertainment featured stage and screen stars in what was called the finest theater “this side of Kansas City.” Movie actress Ginger Rogers once danced across the stage.

  D. D. Degler opened his Granada Photo Studio in the north wing of the Fox Granada Theater building a full year before the movie palace showed its first film in 1929. Degler’s studio and the movie palace thrived until the 1960s, when film-going patterns changed, and a series of different building owners neglected the structure.

  By the time Dixon bought the business in 1975, the fortunes of the old-fashioned portrait photographers had begun to wane. The bulky view cameras were virtual dinosaurs. Smaller, faster formats like 35mm had made location shooting more desirable by both photographers and customers. Wedding portraits were being made in churches, rarely in the studio, and much of the heavy old equipment had been relegated to the status of quaint artifacts of a bygone era. In many cases, individuals and families opted to take their own photographs with readily available and sophisticated consumer cameras.

  “The most recent technology Mrs. Burnell had was a five by seven plate camera,” Dixon recalls. “It even had the hood the photographer put over his head. The image was on a glass negative that you saw upside down and backward. She was still making a living, but she made a lot of her income from copying and restoration work.”

  Dixon managed to keep the photo studio open until 1989, even after the theater shut its doors. His was the sole business left in the original structure, which had suffered greatly from the owners’ neglect.

  The theater was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, but it was not until 1994 that a citizens group formed and rallied to restore and reopen the Granada, shortly before it was scheduled for demolition. The theater now features a wide variety of programming events year-round in a setting that makes full use of its original splendor.

  When Dixon starts talking about the haunting of his photo studio, he emphasizes that he does not “see dead people.” That simple declaration underscores his unnerving experiences in the fifteen years he ran Old Deg’s photo studio.

  For the most part, Dixon was a typical small-business owner. He worked at all hours of the day and night photographing clients, manning the upstairs shop full of photography-related equipment and supplies, and processing film in the basement-level photo lab/darkroom. But over the years, he grew weary—and wary—of the almost palpable sense of dread he felt in the shop that did not diminish with familiarity.

  “Whatever this was, it was resentful [of me]. That was my overwhelming sensation. I noticed so many things long before I ever mentioned the [haunting] to anyone.”

  When he did start discussing his beliefs with friends or employees who helped out, nearly every one of them noticed two recurring sensations: a fragrant pipe tobacco and the overwhelming sense that someone was watching what they did, especially in the gloomy darkroom in the basement. Dixon said that any skeptic who worked with him for a time did not stay that way very long.

  He admits that spending hours on end with no bright light in a film-processing lab can be disconcerting to some people. The only illumination usually comes from red safelights used by film photographers so as not to spoil images on white-light-sensitive photo paper. But what he felt in his own darkroom went beyond the normal discomfort in that setting.

  He explained, “I thought there was something odd [in the darkroom], something vaguely out of sync. Blood didn’t drip from the ceiling, nor did I have ectoplasm heads floating in midair, but there was still that oddness.”

  Dixon knew that his fears seemed illogical even though the darkroom itself—with twelve-foot-high ceilings—was eerie enough. Steep concrete steps led from the street-level studio down to the basement corridor that ended at what Dixon described as a kind of “dungeon” reborn with moist walls, a chemical-stained floor, and ancient corroded electrical outlets. In this setting, the high-tech photo enlargers seemed almost out of place. The whole setup was illuminated by the soft red glow from a safelight.

  The ceiling of the darkroom was the floor of the gallery part of the photo studio. The floors overhead were poured concrete and steel a foot thick in places. Yet the room acted almost as an echo chamber for any sounds coming from the gallery. The softest of footsteps from above could be heard clearly.

  The most disconcerting aspect of working alone in the darkroom was that disturbing feeling of being watched. Dixon called it a presence of some one or some thing there in the dark with him while he worked.

  Oddly this presence exhibited a certain “tide” about itself, a kind of “ebb and flow,” beginning as very pronounced during the morning hours and increasing steadily during the day, reaching a pinnacle as night descended.

  Rarely did Dixon work in the darkroom later than early afternoon. Evenings were strictly off limits. “I noticed that the later the hour, the greater the sensation of uneasiness I would have,” he said. He remembered Udene Burnell telling him that during the studio’s boom years, the evening and night hours had been prime time for Degler and his staff to play catch-up on the day’s accumulation of work.

  At first, Dixon did not think whatever kept him company down there was necessarily out to “get him.” He speculated, “Perhaps it was oblivious to my even being there, or maybe Old Deg was still there doing in death what the flesh and blood had enjoyed in life.”

  The malicious feelings grew as Dixon made changes and improvements in the business. Dixon thinks Old Deg began to consider him an interloper and wanted to squeeze out the new man in town. He said, “I got to the point near the end that hardly anything could convince me to go into that darkroom after two or three in the afternoon. It was just so incredibly uncomfortable, extremely oppressive.”

  All of this affected his ability to conduct his business. It was very difficult to focus on quality print processing, for instance, which was critical to establishing a solid reputation for a struggling small photo business. “I had this feeling that his was a malevolent force that just did not want me there. Period.” He found even going to work difficult and that photography—which he had found so enjoyable—was now “nearly intolerable” to pursue.

  Early on in the business, Dixon met another young photographer who shared his passion for photography. His name was Charles Evans and he eventually became Dixon’s business partner.

  “Charles was full of energy and ideas. What he lacked in acumen he more than made up for with enthusiasm,” said Dixon. Plus they enjoyed working in the darkroom where both believed much of the “magic” of film-based photography took place.

  Evans was quick to catch on that Dixon had a dislike to working in the darkroom after midafternoon. Dixon said, “He asked me why my aversion, why would I sacrifice the quiet early morning hours before opening to finish things up rather than during the evening and nighttime hours, as was his habit.”

  “I told him that I experienced several previous encounters with a certain foreboding, a presence that I had taken to calling Deg,” Dixon explained.

  In addition to the presence he felt, there was that smell of pipe tobacco even though neither man smoked a pipe.

  And the cold—the steady, ever-present coolness that suddenly morphed into a narrow column of frigid air would abruptly encircle him.

  “Then that sudden cold moved from one side of the room to
the other,” said Dixon, as if its source shifted position.

  Although the presence seemed to manifest itself most frequently whenever Dixon was working alone, both Dixon and Evans noticed that a “deep chill” almost always greeted them as they made their way down the staircase, much more pronounced than one would expect in an old basement. Dixon felt it was as if someone was waiting there.

  Evans, however, still did not understand Dixon’s reluctance to work late hours in the darkroom. He was not being bothered in any significant way. Thus far.

  Charles Evans’s doubts were shattered in a disturbing episode one October afternoon.

  Evans and his teenage daughter Mary Ann, who was working for him in the shop, decided to go in on a weekend and get a head start on the upcoming week’s work by processing a roll of film, washing and drying it, then proofing each negative.

  Since Mary Ann loved to help during the actual printing process, Charles decided that this would be a good time to send her to a store up the street to get some snacks. By the time she got back, the film would be dry enough to start making enlargements.

  For the drying process, he had turned on the darkroom’s only incandescent bulb. But now he switched that off and turned on both red and green safelights to acclimate himself to the darkness necessary to process prints. He was using a hair dryer to speed along the negatives’ drying.

  He gave Mary Ann the studio key and told her to take her time but to be sure to lock the door behind her.

  Dixon said, “He told me he remembered quite distinctly the sound of her footsteps going up the staircase and across the old floor. It was that echo chamber effect.”

  Evans turned on the water to the print-washing drum and began cutting the dry negatives into work strips of six. It was then he caught the faint aroma of pipe tobacco, at the same time he noticed a stiff current of cool air blow through the room.

  He ignored both and exposed the first sheet of photo paper; he was slipping it into the developer tray when he heard someone walk across the floor above him. He thought it was odd as he had not heard the outside door open and slam shut, which was usually the case. He had been concentrating on the print and did not know if his daughter had been particularly fast in running the errand or had forgotten to take enough money.

  The footfalls seemed to pause. Evans moved toward the door and called out in a loud voice, “Come on down, it’s all right. The safelights are on.”

  There was no answer.

  Yet seconds later he heard her slowly coming down the steps. He had never known Mary Ann to take any staircase slower than two steps at a time. She rounded the corner and down the narrow hallway to the door going into the darkroom. There she stopped.

  “Forget something?” Evans called out again.

  Silence.

  At that point Evans felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He turned around and looked out the door. No one was there. Shadows and darkness, but no Mary Ann.

  He stood stock still for seconds, perhaps a minute or more, his concept of time having escaped him. He did not feel the impact of what was happening until, still staring at the empty doorway, he heard the outside street door above him open and close once again, followed by footsteps across the bare floor and then someone pounding down the steps . . . two at a time.

  “Daddy, it’s me!”

  When Mary Ann walked into the room, she saw her father standing stock still holding a pair of tongs dripping photo chemicals.

  The image he had been working on had “come up” on the photo paper but had overdeveloped, leaving only a totally black image with a crisp white edge.

  Evans felt an extraordinary mixture of panic and fatigue. He turned off the darkroom water, grabbed his daughter by the shoulders, and rushed her up the staircase to the brightness of the studio. He did not tell her what had happened. He turned off the lights and left with his daughter, locking the door behind him.

  It was more than two weeks before Evans told Dixon about the episode. And that only came after Dixon pointed out to him that he was falling behind in his darkroom work.

  “I never knew of a single occasion when he entered the old basement again after twelve noon. The joking stopped. He never mentioned that day to me again,” said Dixon.

  S. C. Dixon remained open in the old Granada photo studios until 1989 when the theater building closed. He was happy to be able to move his business to a new studio several blocks away, especially after one final episode that cemented his decision to relocate.

  Dixon had installed a makeshift electric buzzer on the front door that emitted a loud buzz whenever someone walked in, loud enough for Dixon to hear if he was working downstairs—in the morning, of course. The problem is that it rarely, if ever, worked.

  “I had tinkered with it time and again trying to make it work. I never had any luck. So I put a sign on the counter saying I was in the darkroom and I’d be right up,” said Dixon, adding that he relied on hearing someone call out or their footsteps.

  Dixon discovered on a late winter afternoon that something else could trip it, but exactly who or what it was he did not know.

  On that afternoon Dixon securely bolted the door and left for the darkroom below.

  “I absolutely had some project I had to get done, so I went down there and tried to immerse myself in work. But I was bothered to a dramatic degree that it was so late in the day. I wanted to get out of there. Finally I finished my work, and I’m going up those long, steep concrete stairs and I remembered I’d forgotten something down there that I needed. I went back down and that buzzer went off. I will not deny that I screamed like a little girl and jumped about four feet in the air.”

  Dixon had never, ever heard the buzzer except for an occasional short burst when he was tinkering with it. This time, he said, it was “ringing like a fire bell.”

  He scrambled back up the stairs and into the empty shop within seconds. The door was tightly secured.

  Although he consulted with electricians, he failed to find an adequate explanation.

  “That was actually one of the last times I went down there.”

  Even after Dixon opened his new photography studio, stories about his “haunted studio” continued to circulate.

  Shortly after restoration work on the Fox Granada got underway in the 1990s, the local newspaper sent a reporter and photographer to meet Dixon at his old studio. The newspaper was publishing a story about the ghost of Old Deg and wanted to talk with Dixon in what remained of the darkroom. Perhaps against his better judgment, Dixon agreed. He had not been in the space for several years. It brought back all the old memories.

  “I kind of knew the (newspaper) photographer. He was a young guy, very skeptical, and thought the whole thing was silly.”

  The newspaper men came loaded down with several floodlights, but since the electricity had been shut off in the basement, a long extension cord had to be run from the main floor down the staircase. The photographer unpacked his gear and had everything set up for the interview and photos.

  He had been joking that he hoped something “scary” would happen that he could take pictures of, Dixon recalled. It did.

  At the precise moment the interview got underway, the two big floodlights exploded, first one and then the other.

  The three men were left standing in total darkness.

  Dixon said, “Good job, pal! Now you’re going to have to deal with the poltergeist in the dark.”

  Beverly Beers co-owns and manages the Granada Coffee Company in the north wing of the Granada complex, the same space once taken up by S. C. Dixon’s photography studio.

  She firmly believes that Old Deg is still around and that he is a kind of “guiding spirit” for her and the business she operates.

  “The only thing I can figure out is that maybe Deg saw S. C. as a kind of competition, but we’re not. We’ve had a friendly and warm embrace from him.”

  She does not advertise the presence of a poltergeist in her coffee shop.

  �
�I don’t talk about it much. People look at me a little funny if I do. But whether you believe in these things or not, once it happens to you there is no longer any doubt in your mind.”

  Since the coffee shop opened in 2002, Beers and her business partner, Rocky Slaymaker, had a sense that something unseen was hanging around the shop and that it liked playing the trickster.

  For instance, Beers and Slaymaker were the only employees during the shop’s first few months in business. To minimize their workload and maximize their small space, they were intent on making sure there was a specific place for every utensil they used. Once they were done with the implement, they put it back in its proper space. But even with that zealous commitment to organization, they would find that items had moved to some new location or even vanished.

  “We had a stool that we used to clean the espresso machine. One day it just disappeared. We couldn’t find it anywhere in the shop. The next day it was right back where it belonged,” Beers said.

  Beers thinks Deg has embraced the coffee shop owners because of their interest in conserving the building. She believes he has shown directly on several occasions just how much he cares.

  At the end of long days—especially in the early months—she would count out the day’s cash receipts. When she got tired or confused, perhaps losing track of the totals or becoming frustrated in some other way, she would often find a sense of calm suddenly settle over her. The answers she was struggling for, or some sort of clear solution, would soon be there.

  “That happened on almost a daily basis. There’s really no way to describe it,” she said. “I think we were pure of heart in starting this business. We really had no clue about what we were doing. I taught school for sixteen years and my partner worked as an assistant to film set decorators. Perhaps because of that we were being embraced by Deg.”

  One winter afternoon shortly before Christmas and not long after the shop opened, Beers physically felt that embrace. She found herself alone in the shop. No one was about on the cold, snow-swept streets. She gave in to the quiet winter scene outside and dropped into one of the two big, comfy armchairs to relax and watch the snowfall through the front window.